Quick Southern green beans give you the flavor of long-simmered traditional Southern green beans in barely over half an hour! Scroll down for video.

No. Quick Southern green beans is not an oxymoron. You can indeed make green beans that are tender, with the flavor of bacon (or ham, if that’s more your thing) and perfectly seasoned in just a little more than thirty minutes. I am not joking.

I’ve lived in Tennessee my entire life. Every potluck, every church dinner, every holiday, and, yes, every post-funeral meal, involves slow-cooked Southern-style green beans. Sometimes there is onion, or, like my grandmother used to do, there might be peeled new potatoes. But always, always, there is ham hock involved. And lots of simmering. Those are the magic ingredients, and until maybe about a year ago I thought that if you took away either of those ingredients, well, you could not have true Southern green beans. Thankfully I was incorrect.
I have no idea the origin of this recipe or honestly even if my recipe is anything like the original, but my mom made something like this a while back and a month or two later I started making this on a regular basis, using my memory of what she told me was in the green beans she made. The bacon and onion take 5-10 minutes, then simmering the green beans takes about twenty minutes, and another 5-10 minutes to reduce the liquid. I like to add a brown sugar glaze, but if you don’t want to do that, well, don’t (though I encourage you to try it at least once. It’s amazing.).

Preheat a medium saucepan (I used a 10-inch cast-iron skillet) over medium heat. Place the bacon into the pan and cook until almost crisp. Add the onions and cook until they are tender and translucent.

Add the green beans and the chicken stock to the pan. Bring to a simmer, reduce heat to medium-low, cover, and simmer for about twenty minutes or until tender, stirring occasionally.

Remove the lid and raise the heat to medium-high. Simmer vigorously until most of the liquid has evaporated.

If using, add the brown sugar, stir to coat, and allow to cook until the brown sugar makes a "glaze" on the green beans-two to three minutes. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Serve immediately.

If you’ve ever felt like “perfect caramelized onions” was an oxymoron or just more or less impossible, you need to check out my five tips below! Scroll down for video.

For years I felt like perfect caramelized onions were going to elude me forever. I always seemed to end up with what looked like blackened worms in a pan…and that was even after I was an established food blogger. I got sick of it and started studying the methods of my favorites: America’s Test Kitchen, Alton Brown, and J. Kenji Lopez-Alt. I’ve combined what I’ve learned from those places with quite a bit of practice to bring you these tips for perfect caramelized onions.

1. Turn up the heat
For years I believed that you had to caramelize onions over ultra-low heat and that it took at least an hour to get them to that perfect syrupy consistency. Following the tips below, though, I have learned that I can keep my heat on medium to get my onions caramelized in 30 minutes or less.2. Crowd the pan
This goes against everything we’ve been taught about caramelizing food, right? When we’re cooking meat and many vegetables (mushrooms come to mind here), we want to keep plenty of space in the pan so that the moisture doesn’t ruin our caramelization. With onions, though, we want the moisture. I use the smallest pan that I can fit all of my onions in and once they shrink up I keep them all pushed together. I spent too much time burning my onions in a dry pan to let it happen again!

3. Sweeten the pot
All caramelization is is a reaction that draws out the natural sugars in a food. It makes sense, then, that adding a little sugar to the pan will just speed up that process. I don’t add a lot…about a tablespoon of sugar for every cup or so of onions. You don’t want to add so much that it will make the onions overwhelmingly sweet, just enough to amp up the caramelization process.

4. Don’t be afraid to season
A little salt will draw out some of the moisture in your onions, so I always add a generous sprinkle when I first put the onions in the pan. Later, I add a little more to taste. Black pepper is also good at the end, of course, and you can also add some fresh herbs (thyme is especially apropos).5. Liquid is your friend
Going back to number 3…I ruined a lot of onions back before I knew better by cooking them in too large of a pan without any liquid. Now, the second that I see that the natural moisture from my onions has evaporated, I throw in some liquid. I always always start with a little alcohol – whiskey or sherry – and then finish with plain old water. If you’d rather not, though, you can just use water, or even some chicken stock. I just add a little bit at a time, and as the liquid evaporates, I add a little more, until the onions have reached the consistency and color that I am looking for.

Set a medium pan over medium heat. Add the butter to the pan and allow it to melt.

Add the onions to the pan and stir to coat with the butter. Add the salt and the sugar and stir again.

Turn the heat up to medium-high and cook, stirring constantly, until the onions start to brown and browned bits cling to the pan. Add the whiskey and stir, scraping the pan, to deglaze.

Continue cooking, stirring constantly. As the liquid dries up, add water two tablespoons at a time. Repeat until all of the water is gone and the onions are golden and syrupy. Remove from the heat and add more salt if desired. Serve as desired.

Recipe Type: side dishes, kitchen basics, vegetarian

Notes

This recipe can easily be scaled up or down. I frequently cook about half this amount, just using a smaller pan.

This easy Mexican street corn doesn’t really resemble what you might eat on a vacation to Mexico, but it’s delicious and so easy-made in the microwave!
I totally fail at side dishes. I’m always like, “Oh, we should eat a salad every night! Salads are easy!” and then I forget, or I remember halfway through cooking a casserole that I was planning to serve some potatoes or broccoli or whatever with it. We have a tendency to eat more one-pot kinds of meals (soups, rice dishes, etc.) rather than a “meat and three” or whatever type of meal, and honestly I sometimes wonder how people juggle six different things going on in their kitchen. If I was going to serve a bunch of side dishes (and some people do indeed serve multiples) I’d have to prep everything the night before in order to not be running around sweating and piling dishes over the top of my sink (well, that would probably happen anyway).
Occasionally, though, I do remember. And sometimes the side dishes are as simple as this easy Mexican street corn. No one throw any stones at me; I know that this doesn’t really resemble the Mexican street corn that you might actually eat on a vacation to Mexico. However, it does contain some traditional components of that dish: mayonnaise (instead of the butter that we like to slather on our corn in these parts), cheese, chili powder, and cilantro (though those of you who have that genetic aversion that makes cilantro taste like bleach or soap or whatever can certainly feel free to leave it off).
Philip and I both hate eating corn straight off of the cob (I blame my distaste for corn on the cob on my overbite, but I also hate getting corn stuck in my teeth) so we shave it right off. Throw the ingredients all into a bowl and stir. That easy. Did I mention that the corn is cooked in the microwave? I’ve been seeing the microwave-in-the-husk method a lot (presumably because corn is in season right now) and it’s a super-simple way to cook corn without the annoyance or the guesswork of boiling, the heat of grilling, and the need to dirty a pan to roast the corn in the oven. The husks slip off easily, and though I love to use a bundt pan for shaving the corn off, you can get the job done in a wide bowl using a careful grip on your knife.

This easy Mexican street corn is so quick and simple – there are no excuses not to make it!

Zucchini and yellow squash tacos with mushrooms not only give you an easy and delicious way to use up your bounty of squash, they’re quick and filling!
When did we become adults? I blinked and missed it (note: that blink happened a long time ago…I’ve been an adult for a lot longer than I’d like to admit). While Philip and I were having dinner at Two Ten Jack with our friend Brian, with whom we’ve been friends since we were teenagers (over twenty years, in fact), I realized how much our conversations have changed. Of course, my earliest conversations with Brian were mostly work-related (we were all Chuck E. Cheese’s co-workers back in the mid-nineties) but then after Philip and I started dating when I was in my early twenties and we would hang out with Brian our conversations were generally about music: what shows we’d been to, what CDs we’d bought, etc.

Our conversations that night were about a variety of things: politics, work, craft beer (a love Philip and Brian share), and food issues. Brian chooses to eat a mostly vegetarian diet, and as we were discussing the many reasons that he does so I laughed in my head thinking about how we were the old people I would have made fun of twenty years ago. Why so serious? It’s just food.
There’s no such thing as “just food” any more. Food = life for me in so many ways. I have been pretty open here about the fact that I have gained a few pounds over the last few years, due to a variety of factors. Blogging is, I’m certain, one of them. Moving into a more sedentary job is another, and, as much as I’d like to deny it, my doctor says that age is a factor as well. Age must be the reason that appearance is no longer the sole reason that I’m concerned about my weight (though I would be lying if I said that it wasn’t a concern). Health is my major concern, and I’ve been trying to weight my food choices more toward health than decadence (because food doesn’t have to be decadent to taste good). Sorry if my blog doesn’t always reflect that, though I promise I’m trying.

Recipe development in the summer definitely lends itself to promoting healthy cooking. I don’t take the omission approach to healthy cooking. I believe that you should eat the things that you want to eat in moderation and concentrate on making it mostly about the healthiest foods that you love. Luckily, I love fruits and vegetables, so June, July, and August are more or less an eater’s paradise for me.
A trip to the produce stand last week resulted in an excess of zucchini and yellow squash, so in my haste to find a way to use them all up I decided to cook up some squash tacos. Onions and mushrooms seem at home in squash tacos, don’t they? In my house, onions and mushrooms are at home in pretty much anything, but that’s just us. Soft corn tortillas, onions cooked till they’re on the verge of caramelization, zucchini, yellow squash, smoked cheddar cheese (or whatever you’ve got, but smoked cheddar works so well here), and a drizzle of sour cream and Sriracha. That’s what I call squash taco perfection.

If you have some extra zucchini and yellow squash to use up, why not make these zucchini and yellow squash tacos?

Place the cut zucchini and yellow squash on a plate lined with several layers of paper towels. Sprinkle with 1 teaspoon of the salt and let stand while you prepare the onions and mushrooms.

In a medium pan, heat one tablespoon of the olive oil over medium heat. Add the onion and the remaining 1/2 teaspoon of salt. Cook until translucent and beginning to caramelize. Add the mushrooms and cook until tender.

Press the top of the squash with more paper towels to remove excess liquid. Add the squash to the pan with the onions and mushrooms and cook until tender and beginning to brown, 3-5 minutes. Remove from heat and salt and pepper to taste.

Heat the tortillas according to package directions. Fill with the vegetables and top as desired. Serve immediately.

By the way, the taco holders featured in the pictures are seriously life-changing and very inexpensive. I have included an affiliate link for them below. This means that if you click the link and make a purchase, I will receive a small commission. This does not affect the cost to you. For more information, please see my disclosures. Thank you for supporting my blog!